The present invention generally relates to the use of a mobile device for healthcare provision and medical software therefore.
In healthcare practices, it is common for nurses administering medications to confirm the “five rights” of medication administration: right patient, right drug, right dose, right route, and right time.
Historically, nurses would manually confirm each of these rights prior to medication administration. As technology has developed, medication administration has evolved, and technology, such as bar code scanning, is utilized in many medication administration processes. For example, in an exemplary conventional bar code medication administration (BCMA) process, a nurse scans a barcode associated with a medication, and then scans a barcode printed on a patient's wristband, and software confirms the medication is the right medication for the right patient. Existing software may confirm other of the “five rights”, but this confirmation is not exposed to a user, so a healthcare practitioner has to either trust that the software is confirming the “five rights”, or manually confirm the “five rights”.
Sometimes, however, a particular barcode is unreadable or cannot be scanned, or a barcode is not available. Frequently, medical software configured for barcode scanning will allow a user to bypass a scan feature when needed. Generally, however, this bypass feature requires a user to leave a scanning interface to enter required information for the bypass.
Further, it is common for nurses administering medications to review patient vitals and lab results. This information is commonly available in electronic health record software, but accessing it typically requires multi-step navigation through the software.
It is similarly important that nurses administering medications have access to allergy information.
In many cases, a clinician initially only cares about whether there are allergies or not and how severe they are. A low severity allergy is not as important as a high severity one. For patients with a long list of allergies, it is often hard to scan them to determine how severe they are and what a clinician needs to pay attention to. In some existing medical software, allergy information is truncated and a clinician needs to hover to find important information, which may be at the end of the list. Further, in many cases environmental (latex) or food (peanuts or shellfish) allergies are just as dangerous (or more so) than drug allergies. These are not always emphasized or are displayed later in the list. There is no way to easily to see that a patient has severe allergies without taking the time to sort through the allergy list.
The display of allergy information for a patient is essential during many aspects of patient care, but for patients with multiple allergies, it is hard to display the entire list of allergies in an application interface all of the time in a way that will be meaningful to a clinician.
Needs exist for improvement in medical software for a mobile device. These, and other needs, are addressed by one or more aspects of the present invention.